5G paves the way for Vodafone to cut more cables

Friday, 11 October 2019

Vodafone NZ says 5G fixed-wireless plans could have 500Gb data caps.

Vodafone New Zealand hopes upgrades to its mobile network will allow it to serve about a quarter of its 400,000 home broadband customers using fixed-wireless connections.

These provide an alternative to copper connections or ultrafast broadband.

Vodafone will launch a 5G network in the three main centres and in Queenstown in December

Technology director Tony Baird said the biggest immediate benefit was that it would allow for more fixed-wireless plans with data caps of perhaps 500 gigabytes a month.

5G technology will pave the way for more instant computing away from the office and home, but it won't deliver on its full potential from day one.

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A quarter of Vodafone's broadband customers could be using fixed-wireless broadband in a couple of years, says technology director Tony Baird.

The company was also reallocating some more of its lower-frequency radio spectrum to support 4G, which would enable it to provide better fixed-wireless by 'infilling' its existing coverage of urban areas, he said.

Vodafone was considering switching off its 3G network some time between 2023 and 2025 as part of a rejig of its mobile services, he said.

That could affect customers with older devices including Apple phones that pre-date the iPhone 5, but any impact could be mitigated by the fact it had no plans yet to turn off 2G which is still used to wirelessly read most of the country's home electricity meters.

Vodafone currently has about 46,000 customers who use fixed-wireless broadband, including homes in rural areas whose service has been subsidised through the Government's Rural Broadband Initiative.

But Baird said he would like to see about 25 per cent of Vodafone's customer base using it within two to three years.

5G currently allows mobile and broadband connections with close to gigabit transfer speeds.

Baird said he would be wary of suggesting 5G could allow for uncapped wireless-broadband plans, but plans with very high data caps that customers were 'unlikely to use' would be possible.

Spark wireless broadband plan have a maximum monthly cap of 240GB.

'It sounds very bland, but the main investment case for 5G is fixed-wireless and getting ourselves ready to do a lot more wireless to the home and wireless to the business,' Baird said.

That could change over time.

5G pushes the intelligence of mobile networks out to each cellphone site, which will allow some services that people access over 5G to be delivered much closer to the customer, once agreed industry standards are in place to allow that to happen.

The advance, which is a form of 'edge computing', will reduce network lag in situations where 5G customers or devices such as autonomous vehicles, autonomous reality headsets or robotic equipment may be interacting with information from devices and sensors that are nearby.

Data could need to travel no further than to and from the nearest cellsite, which in industrial applications could be just metres away.